Towards Happier Organisations: Understanding the Relationship between Communication and Productivity

Advancements in communication technologies change the way we interact with each other significantly, making distance less of an issue for keeping in touch and collaborating with others. However, they can also take away social elements such as the feeling of closeness in an interaction, making it important to examine the effects that these technologies (the virtual workplace, smart phones and ubiquitous computing), have on our everyday lives, in the workplace, at home and in society. This work investigates in-depth the communication practices within a traditional workplace in an attempt to understand whether workers have more interactions face to face or if there has been a shift to a more indirect form of communication, such as email. We analyse the interactions between the participants of the study to understand these changes and how they affect our work (productivity, deadlines, interesting task) and our wellbeing (positive and negative affective states),by using a variety of data collection methods (sensors and surveys). Our analysis revealed that when considering all of the data in the study that email was the most frequent medium of communication, but when taking into account just the communication within working hours (8am to 7pm), that face to face interactions were prefered. Correlation analysis revealed significant relationships between Afective States and Situational Factors while Longitudinal Analysis revealed an impact of communication features and measures of self reported Productivity and Creativity. These fndings lead us to believe that different communication processes (synchronous and asynchronous) can impact Positive and Negative Affective States as well as how productive and creative you feel at work.